The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Friday approved the so-called regulatory sandbox framework for the stock market ecosystem. The term is used for live testing new financial technology (fintech) solutions on actual customers, without having to be fully licensed, but under strict regulatory supervision.

Sebi’s new framework allows live testing on a small set of customers for a limited period of time.

“Entities regulated by Sebi shall be granted certain facilities and flexibilities to experiment with FinTech solutions in a live environment and on limited set of real customers for a limited time frame. These features shall be fortified with necessary safeguards for investor protection and risk mitigation,” Sebi said in a circular.

The new framework is based on a discussion paper floated by the regulator a year ago.

The world’s biggest lockdown has cost India millions of jobs, resulted in record low economic activity, and fueled the biggest earnings decline in at least six years.

Profits at NSE Nifty 50 Index members fell about 15% last quarter from the same period last year, the worst drop since at least 2014, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. About two thirds of the firms in index have announced results for the March quarter so far. Communications, energy and industrials recorded the steepest declines on an adjusted basis.

Stay-at-home measures triggered by the coronavirus pandemic has kept most of India’s 1.3 billion population indoors since late March, leading to a collapse in business activities. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. expects gross domestic product to contract 5% in the fiscal year through March 2021, which would be

The Gujarat High Court (HC) has stayed unitholders’ voting process for winding-up of six debt schemes of Franklin Templeton MF (FT MF), following plea by Areez Phirozsha Khambatta and Persis Khambatta, who are part of the business family running the popular Rasna juice brand.

The senior counsel appearing for the two petitioners (aged 83 years and 75 years) along with Khambatta Trust contented that FT MF had not followed due regulations in the wind-up process.

“Attention of the court was invited to sub-clause 15(c) of regulation-18 of the SEBI (Mutual Funds) Regulations … to bring out the point that when majority of the trustees decide to wind up or prematurely redeem the units, the trustees have to obtain the consent of the unitholders,” the court order read, citing petitioners’ plea.

Reliance Industries Ltd’s Rs 53,124 crore rights issue, which has already been oversubscribed, on Tuesday received further bids for 88 million shares, taking the subscription to nearly 130 per cent, according to stock exchange data.

The issue subscription data on stock exchanges showed total bids received at 549 million, overshooting the 422.6 million shares on offer by 29.8 per cent.

The BSE received applications for 485 million rights shares, NSE for 56.4 million and the non-ASBA bid quantity stood at 7 million rights shares.

As per Dealogic, the rights issue is the world’s largest by any non-financial company in last 10 years. It opened for the subscription of shareholders on May 20 and will close on June 3, 2020.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani and promoter group had pledged to subscribe to the full extent of their rights entitlements and any unsubscribed

Moody’s Investors Service (Moody’s) downgraded the Government of India’s foreign-currency and local-currency long-term issuer ratings to Baa3 from Baa2 and maintained a negative outlook. The downgrade came after market hours on Monday. READ ABOUT IT HERE

Here’s how leading analysts have interpreted the development and its likely impact on the markets.

Moody’s decision to lower India’s rating is a reflection of the stress in Indian economy and fiscal situation that has been amplified by the virus outbreak. We believe the subdued policy response for short term alleviation of the lockdown related stress would lead to subdued economic growth and lower tax collection. This is likely to aggravate the weakness in credit profile of India. The policy of balancing act seems to have not given the desired results.